Case study: Harley Davidson

Empower your team. Power your organization.

This interview with Harley Davidson Senior Surface Designer, Rick Elchert, was performed in 2012 by the Digital-Tutors team, which is now a part of Pluralsight.

How did Harley Davidson first hear about Digital-Tutors?

While we were in the process of learning different software, a colleague mentioned to look at Digital-Tutors. I was fortunate to come across your website, explored the site and we ended up signing up for a group account.

How has Digital-Tutors been able to help your company and your artists?

I think that we’re a bit different from your other customers in that my team here at Harley Davidson styles and develops the cosmetic surfaces for components on the bike like saddlebags, fairings, gas tanks and things like this. We use Digital-Tutors for a lot of the traditional CAD-type design for parts and a lot of development of the cosmetic free-flow shape for the styling department.

We use mainly 3ds Max, rendering software like V-Ray and we’re also constantly looking at new and different software packages. We are trying to adapt to what’s out there in the movie, entertainment and gaming industries into our product designs, so we’ve used a lot of Digital-Tutors training to learn all kinds of new software to speed up our designs.

What do you enjoy most about having Digital-Tutors as your training partner?

The most enjoyable part has been being able to jump on Digital-Tutors and learn something new in a wide variety of software.

Luckily, within my group we have access to a lot of software. If we see one that can help us, then we’ll get it in-house and then do a little bit of work on it. I know anytime I want to learn something new, I can jump onto Pluralsight and there will be a plethora of videos to teach us new techniques and workflows.

What’s been the feedback from designers on the training?

It’s been only positive feedback. Whenever they need it, no matter the time or day, it’s always been available for them to watch training or get an answer they need.